Don’t forget to check out the comments in the PFRE Flickr contest group by jurors and others. There is a lot of good commentary on the photos this month.

Here are Hamish’s comments:

Many thanks for all your votes – I’m really chuffed to have won this month, especially when there were some fantastic images in the field.

A few notes re the shot.

Most of the hard work in this case was done for me – the property is an exquisitely-renovated mews house in London, with a fantastic level of finish. The walls and ceilings are polished plaster, which gives a lovely reflective shine from the in-set lighting. I also really liked all the horizontal / vertical lines in the space and the crazy staircase, so I was keen to capture an image that was quite geometric and stylized.

Technically, I shot a bracketed series and then fused just two (which were very close in exposure – 1 sec and 0.6 sec @ f11, ISO 100, AWB, 18mm on my trusty old Canon 5d) using the Exposure Fusion feature in Photomatix Pro. Looking back at the workflow now, I could probably have just worked from a single RAW file as the fused image looked a little unreal with its boosted shadows and I ended up crushing them back down in LR!

The main work then was to add a grad filter to the left hand side of the image to reduce the glare, remove the blue / purple daylight casts and straighten the whole thing up. This last bit I did initially in LR and then in Photoshop where I typically use the Perspective Crop tool to tweak out the corners until everything is bang on. And yes, I do get a bit obsessive… I also straighten pictures on other people’s walls!

Back in LR, I used the spot removal tool to remove two smoke alarms from the ceiling and dirt spots from the floor. Finally, I added a small amount of sharpening and noise reduction.

Wow, I’m surprised this was done with exposure fusion! I never would’ve guessed that given the great quality of light, but it’s a good reminder that you don’t always need to use strobes to get a great interior shot. It just takes the knowledge and experience to know when they’re not needed. And a strong eye for composition goes a long way too. 🙂

Nice one Hamish! It’s good to see a one-point perspective image being included in real estate work; so often it’s the shot across the room which seems to get used in a listing. This is such a strong composition which I am sure suits the prestigious subject perfectly.